Maggi, My Love

I remember discovering Maggi one day when I was a kid. I must have been around ten years old at the time and it is likely that Maggi had just hit Indian markets. I don’t recall whether I was in Chandigarh or Delhi, but I do recall tearing open packets and devouring the contents raw, sometimes with the tastemaker sprinkled over them. We – the neighborhood kids and I – even had a technique for it. You had to thoroughly crush the packet, so that the noodles were broken into tiny pieces. Then you had to tear it open and sprinkle the tastemaker around. Then you poured the resultant mess into outstretched hands and expectant mouths. Of course our mothers told us that we mustn’t eat noodles raw, but back then who was listening to mothers?

My love affair with Maggi lasted a long time, through thick and thin. As a teenager, lunch sometimes consisted of a packet of Maggi with a delicious topping of stir-fried tomato-and-onion and, if I were really lucky, a fried egg. Later on, the tomato and onion mix disappeared; by this time cooking Maggi had been delegated by my mother to me, and I, being lazy as ever, found stir-frying tomatoes and onions too tiring. And, being carnivorous as ever, the egg had been replaced by sausages.

I remember visiting a vegetarian friend’s house and being served Maggi; instead of sausages there were lots of chopped, boiled veggies into the noodles. And it was a veggie flavour of Maggi as well (thus far I had always had chicken); it was surprisingly delicious. After that, I took to throwing whatever happened to be in the fridge into a bowl of Maggi. I even went so far as to resort to Maggi when it appeared that some stale and horrid veggies in the fridge might become edible by being smothered in bowl of steaming noodles. The inevitable consequence of this was that I would thrive on the Maggi and ignore the stale and horrible veggies altogether until they rotted and could be safely dispensed with in the manner most suitable to them, viz, in the garbage can.

Marriage threw a bit of a spanner in my affair with Maggi. At first Amit and Maggi didn’t get along too well together. I realized that I would need to devise some stratagem to improve relations. The simplest recourse was to cook really bad meals. But this was really tough for me to do because most things I turned my attention to just seemed to come out well! Or Amit thought so, at any rate. So the next best thing was to not cook anything at all.

At first, when I tried this, it backfired; Amit, with all the enthusiasm of a husband of four months, would venture into the kitchen to whip up something, an action of which the consequences were frequently both disastrous and far reaching and sometimes involved spilling blood. By the sixth month, things were a little better. Instead of heading for the kitchen, Amit would head out the front door to find the nearest restaurant. While this in itself was good, it wasn’t improving the standing of Maggi in the house. It took another several months of potential starvation before Maggi regained her customary place as guest of honor in the kitchen and at the dinner table. At last even Amit had to admit, however grudgingly, that Maggi had her uses and was not all bad.

Last year, when I went to the hills, I had along with me a guide-cum-cook called Ballu. Ballu was a great cook, but on one of our many treks in that period, we made a serious mistake. Being informed that there were plenty of hotels all along the trail, we decided not to carry our stove and kitchen utensils. On that trek of ten days, had it not been for Maggi, we would both surely not have made it back. What the locals loosely termed “hotels” turned out to be tents with a small primus stove where, at a pinch, you could get tea, coffee, and Maggi. In a good year, I have not eaten half as much Maggi as I ate in those ten days at those hotels. It was almost enough to make even a loyal aficionado like me go green around the gills.

But soon after I returned from that trip, Maggi had me in her grips again. There I was, infatuated as ever by her curly tresses, her long, warm arms. It got so bad that whenever Amit left me alone at home, I took advantage of the opportunity to have lunch with Maggi. I wouldn’t exactly say that I wanted him to go away so that I could have Maggi all to myself… but I wouldn’t exactly say I didn’t either.

You know, they say that ultimately in life, you are always alone? That’s true, but even in the worst case, there’s always Maggi.

Going to Ladakh

I’m oscillating between hope and despair in the final few days before leaving for Leh. The reason: I’ve been down with a virulent viral since last week. Over the weekend, the fever came and went and I was not averse to spending long hours lying in bed and doing nothing - most unusual for me. Now the fever seems to have gone, but I’m left with a cough, stuffed nose and heavy head. Nothing unusual for a cold.

Trouble is, it was a much less potent cold last year, which, followed by a trip to Leh upgraded itself to Pulmonary Edema in short order. Not only is Pulmonary Edema potentially fatal (as opposed to a common cold that only makes you feel like death) but I also managed to ignore it long enough to bring matters dangerously close to critical.

So, naturally, it is with misgivings and in the face of some concern from near and dear ones, that I prepare for the departure to Leh this weekend.

My state of mind is not improved by the news from my would-be publishers, who recently announced that they would rather not be.

So, with these various slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, life goes on.

For news from Leh, watch this space after 4 weeks.

On Beauty

From a young age, I’ve been ugly.

Now wait a second. Before you start assuring me that I’m not ugly, that beauty is only skin deep anyway, and before you start giving me all those other platitudes about beauty, brains and judging a book by its cover and so on, let me finish.

Perhaps it’s debatable whether I am or have ever been ugly or not; but what’s for sure is that I was convinced that I was ugly. For a start, from an early age my mother told me that I had horrible fat legs and thighs like hers, not slim, shapely one like my sisters. She also made me aware that I have “goose-pimple” skin – those tiny bumps on the skin of the arms and legs which make me look as though I’m cold even when I’m not. And she referred to my hair as “pig’s bristles” because it was thick and spiky. I’m sure she meant no harm, but that early assessment of my physical assets stayed with me for a long, long time, and I always envied my sister her sleek, lanky build, delicate face, and angelic long hair.

Then, later, I was laughed at for my fat “pakoda” nose. Was it some convoluted form of revenge that at the age of 5, I pushed my sister off the jungle gym (unintentionally, I swear!) in the school playground, causing her a broken nose with a palpable bump that is still discernible to the keen eye?

The only physical features I was ever admired for were my fair skin (at the time, I was fairer than I am now) and my impish grin. While my sister was forever trying to hide her crooked teeth, I proudly displayed mine, which were just as crooked, in a cheerful grin that stretched from ear to ear. And was it this early appreciation of my fair skin that was responsible for my own bias towards fair skinned beauty?

When I reached my early teens, things hadn’t improved at all. I was plump, wore glasses (lenses wouldn’t suit – I tried), and had terrible acne which eradicated all advantages of my fair skin. At one stage, for no discernible reason, in addition to the ordinary teenager variety of pimples I also sprouted these huge, gross, suppurating sores on my face. They appeared one at a time over a period of weeks (or was it months?) when I was in the eighth or ninth standard – the “boyfriend” age. They were so bad, that at one stage my mother suggested that I might not want to go to school. Yes, that bad.

To make matters worse, I was no good at sports either. At least if I could jump farthest, run fastest, throw hardest, or score in hockey or cricket or even throwball, there might have been some redeeming factor; but there wasn’t. I couldn’t even dance right. In the dance/PE class, I was handed a skipping rope and banished to the furthest corner of the field.

So, I decided. Since I could not hope to win any popularity contest in the looks or sports categories, I would aim for the awards in the brains department.

This was actually easy. I never had to study much, all I had to do was stay on top of the homework, which, being a “good little girl” I could always manage. I was good at English and had already come to grips with my bete noir, Hindi, and I had a natural flair for Math. Physics and Chemistry were easy to master as well, so long as I read the books and didn’t pester the teachers with too many pesky questions in class. The social sciences – geography, history, civics – I wasn’t so good at. But, those were not the subjects one had to excel at in order to gain respect and admiration from classmates. Those were the “dumbo” subjects – any dumbo could mug up the text and spew it out at exam time and at least make the passing mark. Not so in Math, Physics, Chemistry or even English. So, without making much of an effort at it, I became the “brainy one” amongst the girls – the one who could compete with the brainy boys at these subjects, who could argue intelligently (and ferociously) and could get 95% in a Math test, a feat virtually unheard of at any time, specially among girls.

I deliberately turned my back on beauty. I could not win, so I would not compete. While other girls discovered the pain of waxing, threading and other such tortures, I let my body hair grow as it would, defiantly telling myself that I’d be the way the creator made me. While they oiled and bleached and henna’ed their luxurious locks, I cut the hair on my head as short as I could. In some way, I hoped that by keeping my hairstyle “radical”, I could distract viewers from concentrating on the hopelessly scarred skin of my face.

I turned my back on the “boyfriend rat-race” as well. Beauty is only skin deep, I reminded myself sternly, and any boy who was attracted to beauty was not worth having. I would only value a person who liked me for what I was, not for how I looked. Strangely enough, this strategy won me two “prize” catches. One was Amit – a strange sort of boy who actually thought me the most beautiful woman in the world! (And still does, if I were to believe all he says…) The other catch was even more surprising.

You know how every class has this one outstanding boy? Not the brainy one, but the cool dude, the stud, the one who is most cheeky with teachers, most charming with girls, and the best scorer on the cricket/football/whatever team? Yeah, that guy. He’s the one who usually has the best looking girl as his girlfriend, and a long queue of other girls waiting in line. Well, naturally, I wasn’t one of the girls waiting in line – which is probably why he noticed me in the first place.

So, I learnt an important lesson: you can opt out of the rat-race and still win it.

I never realized quite how thoroughly and deeply I had rejected the beauty rat race. I spent many years denying I could be beautiful. I tried to keep my weight under control to be “healthy” but that apart I never tried to be anything but Plain Jane – glasses, short hair, no make-up (except at weddings) and Jeans and sneakers as the preferred style of clothing. From time to time, I wished I were beautiful – but I always suppressed this desire quickly and sternly. 

Of late, nothing has changed. But, I have become more comfortable about the whole beauty game. I have accepted that it is not wrong to want to be beautiful. I have even started to think that perhaps I’m not as ugly as I always thought I was, and that I could be “prettier” if I made an effort. I still don’t often make an effort, but I no longer see beauty and brains as being competitive or mutually exclusive attributes. I think I’m intelligent, and I’m happy to be so, but I realize now that I’ve spent too many years exalting intelligence and denying the significance of beauty.

There’s a lot you can learn from the whole sorry saga. At a young age, I learnt that I could stand apart and stand alone and still succeed. I found my strengths and capitalized on them to excel instead of following the herd and being worse than mediocre. I realized that if I were designed to fail in the woman’s world, I could at least compete in the man’s world.

As I grew older, I saw beauty give in to time. The girls who used to win the boyfriend race got married and had children and as the ravages of life caught up with them, suddenly they weren’t so outstandingly gorgeous any more. I saw the disillusionment of those who had been more eye-catching than I, as they went through a succession of admirers and wound up hurt and alone. Attractions based on beauty alone were bound to fail, as the allure of that beauty wore off.

And so, I have at last come to the conclusion that the story about the ugly duckling needs to be rewritten. The duckling was never ugly, just different. And when it grew up, it didn’t suddenly just become beautiful; it became beautiful because it found its place in the world, as a swan, not a duck. It became beautiful because it became what it was born to be, instead of trying to be what it could never be.

Who says beauty is only skin deep?